


little godlings

by themorninglark



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Blue Lily Lily Blue Spoilers, M/M, Ronan POV
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-15
Updated: 2015-06-15
Packaged: 2018-04-04 13:18:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,817
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4139028
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/themorninglark/pseuds/themorninglark
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ronan and Adam drive out to a field in the middle of nowhere, lose themselves, and find each other.</p>
            </blockquote>





	little godlings

**Author's Note:**

> I finished Blue Lily, Lily Blue last night. Today, I wrote this. I wanted to try my hand at a brief, atmospheric vignette for these two.
> 
> (I think I'm into this hell, pretty deep.)

“Ronan Lynch,” said Adam Parrish, all flushed Virginia summer and cheekbones of china. “Dream me alive.”

His voice cut like a slow drag, sparks flying long and languid over the tarmac of Ronan’s skin. They had been driving, driving to nowhere, they had thrown themselves down on a field without a name, and they were irreversibly lost beneath a sky like overripe tangerines. They were sticky, and they were one step beyond tired, into delirious.

They were very, very quiet, and loud, at the same time, louder than the cicadas and the relentless heat of the evening.

“Fuck that. You don’t need a dreamer, Parrish,” said Ronan. He reached out without looking, plunged a hand into the cooler next to him and pulled out a can of Coca-Cola, pressed its ice-cold metal body to Adam’s forehead without warning.

Ronan Lynch did not give warnings. He _was_ one.

Adam let out a sound like a strangled yelp. Ronan grinned.

“You need a a _drink_ ,” said Ronan.

“I need to get off the grass,” said Adam, and did, peeling himself upright one elbow at a time.

Ronan noted, with a dispassionate calm, that the back of Adam’s T-shirt was stained dirt-green, and thought that that might distress him to know, that he’d have to maybe spend a little extra to wash that out. Would he? Ronan knew fuck all about laundry.

He did not point it out to Adam, because Adam would tell him, with a scornful pride, that he knew fuck all about laundry.

Adam cracked open the can of Coke. He took a sip.

Ronan lay back, hands behind his head, watching the bob of Adam’s throat, the fine, long line his neck made when he threw it back like that.

“Give that here,” said Ronan. He did not move.

“Get your own,” said Adam. “There’s more right next to you.”

“Maybe I just want to share your things,” said Ronan.

“Asshole.”

“ _Selfish_.”

And Ronan’s lip curled upwards in triumph, watched Adam’s eyes give him a level, damning stare, because he knew he’d hit home with that one.

Adam liked having his own things. Ronan liked giving his away. Getting rid of all the stupid shit in his life, shedding bits of himself till he bled raw and open, found the yawning gap that parted his dreams from his reality.

Adam slid the can of Coke into Ronan’s hand the same way he did everything else, with a practised poise and wild, untamed fingers that shook a little. Only a little. Even his nerves were elegant.

Ronan lifted it to his lips, and drank hungrily.

He was not hungry for Coca-Cola. He was hungry for something bigger, bigger, even, maybe, than Adam Parrish; bigger than Cabeswater and Henrietta, and at the same time, he was hungry for something so delicately infinitesimal that even he could not lay hands on it. He, the reluctant master of making things material, so long as they fit in his head and could be shaped into a prayer.

He was hungry for this moment in time, and it was out of reach and yet right here.

“Are you alive yet?” asked Ronan, flinging the empty can at Adam.

“No,” said Adam. The can bounced off his shoulder, and tumbled down soundlessly onto the grass. “I’ve gone to sleep.”

Ronan smirked. “Are you dreaming?”

“Are _you_ in my dream, Ronan?”

Adam’s voice carried strangely to Ronan, a murmur that hummed a little too dissonant, too challenging to be accidental. It tasted like cinnamon, sweet and spicy on his ears.

 _Danger_ , thought Ronan.

That way lies it.

“You tell me, Parrish,” Ronan said, arching an eyebrow. “Who’s dreaming here?”

“One of us,” said Adam, without missing a beat. He leaned back on his hands, looked up at the clouds in the sky. Ronan felt the dew on the grass soaking through his own fingers and onto the back of his head. He inhaled, earthy brown _terra firma_ and sweat that smouldered.

The damp smelled like truth, like the magnitude of this stolen evening, ticking on to night.

“Why not both?” asked Ronan.

“If we were both dreaming,” said Adam, “I think I’d feel more awake. I think you’d dream me awake.”

“How would _you_ know?”

Adam’s searing, searching gaze found Ronan’s at the same time Ronan’s found his, and the answer in it said _danger, hic sunt dracones._

Ronan did not fear dragons. He’d lived to tell that particular tale. Not that he would ever tell it, not in words like that; there was nothing he could say to anyone who had not witnessed his mania, his night terror of white, his freedom from the shackles of self-hatred.

Adam had to know that Ronan did not fear dragons.

_Do you have a night terror in your back pocket, Ronan Lynch? Can you handle this?_

“I _know_ ,” said Adam, with an enigmatic smile, “because you watch me, you  _live_ me awake, and you dream as you live.”

“Yeah. Bloody fucking violently,” Ronan spat out.

Adam shook his head.

“ _Alive_ ,” was all he said, after a brief pause.

The leather bands at Ronan’s wrist cut into the nape of his neck. He pressed back harder, feeling the ridges mark themselves out in the flesh near the bone.

“Alive,” said Adam again, like he was pronouncing it real, like a bit of Cabeswater sung out through his voice and spoke to Ronan. _Greywaren, Greywaren_ , it called.

“Stop saying that word,” Ronan said. “You might hurt Noah’s feelings.”

“I wanted to say _larger than life_ ,” said Adam. “But that’s bullshit. There’s no _larger_ than life. There’s just life. And then - death. So. Alive, Ronan, that’s what you are.”

“Thanks for the affirmation, Parrish,” said Ronan.

He reached for another can of Coca-Cola, opened it and drank first, himself, this time.

“Or was that Cabeswater?” he asked, after swallowing all the fizz down at once.

“Who knows?” Adam shrugged.

“If it was, tell it to fuck off,” said Ronan. “Tonight’s for you and me _only_. No mystical forests allowed.”

He set the can down, vaulted headstrong and headfirst into the dream space that was Adam Parrish.

He’d made the mistake of thinking Adam was _fragile_ , the first time he’d seen him in Latin class. He couldn’t have been more wrong if he’d tried. Sometimes, Ronan liked being wrong; he liked the sharp metallic taste of a mistake on his tongue and the way his self-recriminations cut like a blade, liked being able to keep on walking straight through the path of shards that cut him to glorious ribbons.

Adam was the opposite of fragile. He was glass that refused to shatter when thrown on the floor. Ronan was glass that splintered at the slightest touch.

He splintered, not from fragility but from the constant vibrations of living life too hard, too fast.

“So,” said Adam. “That’s how it is, huh?”

“That’s how it is,” said Ronan.

The tangerine sky was turning, slowly, into burnished bronze. It darkened round the edges like someone was holding a match to it. Watching it burn and fall away into ashes.

“Are you awake yet?” Ronan asked.

“Are _you_?” Adam shot back.

“I’m always awake,” Ronan said, with a sneer on his lips and a predator’s smile on his voice. “You’ve seen what happens when I sleep.”

“Miracles,” said Adam.

“Demons,” said Ronan, devoutly.

“It’s a fine line,” said Adam. “Look at Matthew.”

“Oh, hell _no_.”

Ronan sat up, sudden and swift, and he felt the blood rush to his head, felt the world go askew for a moment as he drew his knees to his chest.

“Don’t talk about Matthew. Not _now_.”

“Okay,” said Adam.

He did not sound apologetic. There was no need to be.

To say that Ronan appreciated that about Adam would not have been quite right. He did, oh yes, how he did, he was appreciation through and through for the cruel kindness of his second secret, the way that Adam showed no pity because he never wanted any himself; and he was more than _just_ appreciation, he was fire and smoke and embers so hot that they scarred his skin, he was pure pinprick sensations of pleasure. He tingled with it, like a can of Coke shaken rough and hard. He ached for it.

Adam’s dust-coloured hair seemed even more sepia than usual in the light of the setting sun.

Ronan raised a hand to his shaved head, ran the rough surface of his palm down his scalp.

“I’m not your dream, Ronan,” said Adam, quietly.

Ronan turned to look at him.

“I’m not a miracle or a demon.”

“I know,” said Ronan. “You’re really not.”

“I’m - sometimes, I don’t know what I am.”

“Neither do I,” said Ronan. “Congratulations. You’re fucked up. So am I. And we found each other, somehow. Isn’t that just the most fucked up thing of all?”

Adam considered this for a moment. He cocked his head to the side, shot Ronan a look that was disarming in its brutality, in its thirst and its honesty.

“You want to kiss me, don’t you,” he said.

It was a statement. Not a question.

Ronan’s lip twisted. “What if I do?”

“I think I’d like you to kiss me,” said Adam.

And Ronan lay back again on the grass, shot Adam a brilliant glare, seeped in daring and the drunkenness of an addict, deprived. He’d been biting at the surface, deprived of the true depth of this for too long. Of - whatever this emotion was, the unknowable intensity of what tethered them, lashed them tight to each other with knots that left rope burn on their wrists.

“If you want something, Parrish, just _take_ it. You’re a god. You’ve got a fucking ley line at your beck and call.”

“Says you, _Greywaren_.”

And Adam, blue eyes flashing deep in his face, bent down, lay a firm hand on Ronan’s exposed collarbone, fingers like a threat.

“Kiss me, Ronan, or I’m driving your BMW back to St Agnes right now.”

Ronan smiled.

_No, Adam Parrish, I don’t have a night terror in my back pocket. All I have is - you._

He reached up, lazy, caught hold of Adam by the front of his shirt, clenched his fistful of cheap cotton fabric and pulled Adam down towards him.

Ronan was hungry, and Adam’s lips on his felt like an oasis, his tongue brushing the roof of his mouth like scorching sandpaper, his hand on his neck, tracing a slow, deliberate path up to his earlobes, like a whispered call of his name. Not _Greywaren_ , but _Ronan, Ronan Lynch_ , and the hunger soared, turned into a fever, and Ronan felt like he might set the very grass aflame at that moment.

_Ronan Lynch, dream me alive._

Adam Parrish didn’t need a dreamer. He needed _alive_.

That, Ronan could give him, and maybe, now, he’d take it without question.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> With thanks to "Take Me to Church" and to Sana for shamelessly enabling me.
> 
> thank you for reading my first attempt at writing something for these life-ruiners ♥  
> something tells me I haven't seen the last of them.


End file.
